As late as 1834, the London dealer John
Smith listed “Vander Meer, of Delft” among
the “scholars and imitators” of Gabriel Metsu
in his renowned Catalogue Raisonné of the
Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish
and French Painters. He noted that other
writers seemed to be “entirely ignorant” of
this “excellent” artist, whose pictures showed “much of the elegance of Metsu, mingled
with a little of the manner of De Hooge.”
Smith mentioned specifically one painting
by “Vander Meer,” the View of Delft, which he
described as “superb.” In 1822, the picture had
been acquired at a public sale for the grand
sum of 2,900 guilders by the State of the
Netherlands, at the behest of Willem I. It was
placed on view at the Royal Picture Gallery
at The Hague, now better known as the
Mauritshuis, where it remains to this day.

An important turning point in the history
of the taste for Vermeer came when the
French art critic, journalist, and politician
Théophile Thoré (1807–1869) paid a visit
to the Royal Picture Gallery and had his
first and unforgettable encounter with the
View of Delft, sometime around 1842. “In the
Museum at The Hague, a superb and most
unusual landscape captures the attention of
every visitor and makes a vivid impression
on artists and sophisticated connoisseurs,”
Thoré wrote in the Gazette des beaux-arts,
almost a quarter of a century later. “It is a
view of a town, with a quay, an old gatehouse,
buildings in a great variety of styles, walls
and gardens. . . .” The “strange” painting surprised
Thoré, he confessed, as much as the
famed Rembrandts on view. Not knowing
to whom to attribute the arresting cityscape,
he consulted the museum’s catalogue: “‘Jan
van der Meer of Delft’. Heavens! Now there
is someone we don’t know in France, and
who deserves to be better known.” Thanks to
Thoré’s enthusiasm for the forgotten painter
and to his tireless quest during the next
two decades to locate his works, interest in Vermeer grew. While the artists of the French avant-garde were among the first to embrace
the “Sphinx of Delft,” as Thoré nicknamed
him, it took almost half a century before a
wider audience discovered Vermeer.

America came by its first Vermeer in
1887, when the New York financier Henry
Marquand bought the splendid Young Woman
with a Water Pitcher, formerly in a private collection
in Ireland, for a mere $800. He gave
the painting to The Metropolitan Museum
of Art in 1889, the same year he became that
institution’s second president. The picture is
generally thought to be the best of the five
Vermeers now in the Metropolitan’s holdings.
Another Vermeer, The Concert, which
earlier had been part of Thoré’s collection,
crossed the Atlantic a few years later, in 1892,
after Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston purchased it for 29,000 francs (about $5,800)
at the Thoré estate sale in Paris. (This, by the
way, is the Vermeer that was stolen from the
Gardner museum in 1990.) A third Vermeer,
Woman with a Lute, was brought to America
shortly before the turn of the century by
the New York financier Collis Huntington.

Remarkably, Huntington later told The New
York Times that he had known “nothing”
about Vermeer or his growing reputation
when the picture was offered to him in Paris;
he simply “took a fancy” to it, purchasing it
for a scant 2,000 francs (about $400). It was
part of Huntington’s 1900 bequest to The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.